David Siegel, the owner of Westgate Resorts, sent a surprising email to his employees Monday. It said that if President Barack Obama wins re-election and raises Siegel’s taxes, he will have to lay off workers and downsize his company – or even shut it down.

David Siegel is the man who, together with his wife, Jackie, built the largest new house in America, known as “Versailles.” They became symbols of outsized spending, debt and real estate in America. But when the company started buckling under $1 billion in debt during the crisis, the Siegels’ home went into foreclosure and was put up for sale. They cut back on the jet, took the kids out of private school and gave up some of their staff.

So why is David Siegel – a man who defined excess and debt in the 2000s – now saying that debt and spending are ruining the country?

I asked David during a phone interview last night, and he told me that this was about his workers, not himself. He said his own finances have vastly improved. He has paid off all of his major lenders. He said the loan for Versailles is paid off and he’s resuming construction on the home. He has learned his own painful lesson from the debt crunch. “We cut back, we’re lean and mean. That’s what the rest of the country has to do.”

Siegel said he’s not acting out of self interest, but for the interest of his workers. While Westgate has never been more profitable, the company has 5,000 fewer workers than in 2007. He said that if Obama is re-elected and imposes Obamacare and higher taxes, he may just have to let more of his remaining 7,000 workers go. He said he might even shut down the company.

Do you agree or disagree with David Siegel? Are you pro-Obama or pro-Romney?

There’s a massive telescope on the drawing board that hasn’t even started construction yet, but when it’s finished in 2024, it’ll generate more data in a single day than the entire Internet.

For scientists to ensure they’ll be able to handle all that raw information, they need to start working on new computing technologies now. Fortunately, IBM is on it. The computing giant is collaborating with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy) to develop the next-generation computer tech needed to handle the colossal amount of data captured by the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a new radio telescope that will spread sensing equipment over a span 3,000 kilometers wide, or about the width of the continental U.S.A.

The project is called DOME, and it’s challenged to find a way to capture and process approximately one exabyte every day, which works out to about twice the amount of data that’s generated every day by the World Wide Web, IBM says. To do that in a way that doesn’t consume a massive amount of energy, IBM will need to develop some entirely new processing architectures before construction on the telescope begins in 2017.

While the project has only just been announced, IBM already has some ideas in the hopper. Specifically, it’ll be looking at novel ways of stacking chips (today’s chips are flat, though stacking or “3D” tech is around the corner) and using optical technology for interconnects, something the company has already had some success with.

It’s possible the social networks and search engines of the future will be powered by IBM’s coming tech or something like it, enabling them to process an entire Internet’s worth of data for anyone and everyone.